Samsung plans to cut investment in semiconductors by up to 20 percent next year to prevent further price falls.

According to the Korea Times, most of its spending cuts will be to DRAM. Samsung has no plans to build new chip factories next year. The company's top priority next year is to gain more profits rather than expand volume, the paper wrote.

The company had planned to spend 10 trillion won on memory chips but now will only spend eight.

Beancounters at IHS expect Samsung to cut its spending on semiconductors including memory and logic chips to $13 billion next year down from $14 billion this year.

DRAM chips are moving back to a one percent undersupply in 2016 as the smartphone inventory issue resolves itself. Even if the inventory drag persists longer and growth does not pick up it is believed that there will be a more balanced situation next year due to limited supply growth.

The steep fall in DRAM chip prices that threatens the bottom line of manufacturers and Samsung is worried over its worsening profit margin.

The contract price for a DDR3 PC DRAM chip fell to $2.06 in August from $3.94 in December 2013 said dramexchange, a research firm which tracks moves of chip prices.SK Hynix and Micron are expected to follow similar steps to keep memory prices from falling.

Chipzilla might be the world leader for chips and squeezing the lift from AMD at the moment, but for some reason it decided to slash five percent of its workforce.

Intel has announced it will reduce its global workforce of 107,000 by about 5 percent this year as the chipmaker tries to save cash.

Apparently Intel is "struggling with falling personal-computer sales" and wants to shifts focus to faster-growing areas.

The announcement, equivalent to over 5,000 positions, comes a day after Intel posted a fourth-quarter earnings report that did little to dispel concerns about a slowing PC industry.

"This is part of aligning our human resources to meet business needs," spokesman Chris Kraeuter said.

The job reductions may include retirements, voluntary programs and other options, Kraeuter said, adding that Intel's typical annual attrition worldwide is about 4 percent so this is mostly going to be a non-hiring policy. But it is still a little surprising.

Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith alluded to a reduction in employment this year and said that Intel would increase investments in areas such as data centre technology, low-power chips and tablets.Chipzilla culled 10,000 staff as AMD duffed it up in 2006. Overall number of employees has grown since then and AMD is less of a threat.

Apple's favourite news agency, Reuters with its finger firmly on the pulse of reality, actually claims that Intel has been destroyed by Apple bringing in tablets killing off laptops. Given that laptop sales are growing while tablet sales are falling it is probably better that Reuters finds a reporter which does not write his Apple fantasies as real news stories,

Earlier this week, Intel said a newly built factory in Chandler, Arizona, originally slated as a $5 billion project that in late 2013 would start producing Intel's most advanced chips, would remain closed for the foreseeable future while other factories at the same site are upgraded.

Last September, Intel said it would close an old factory in Massachusetts, eliminating about 700 jobs.

Although Nintendo’s 1H 2012 earnings report isn’t quite what we’ve come to expect from Nintendo, the signs are still positive enough, seeing as how the company cut its operating loss in half in a single year.

Nintendo hasn’t had the best of times with Wii and DS sales, quite expectedly as they’re nearing end of their life-cycle, but the company still managed to improve results. The company lost about $366 million from April to September, which, although obviously not great, is still a significant improvement over the loss of $718 million in the same period last year.

3DS initially suffered a slow start but now turned out to be a lifesaver as its sales were up 64.8 percent. This means sales totaled at 5.06 million units, 2.1 million of which are XL models.

The DS sold 970,000 units while the aged Wii managed 1.32 million. This makes for 62.4 and 60.6 percent drops, respectively, but such results were to be expected, especially in the latter case, what with the Wii U just around the corner.

With the launch of the Wii U, Nintendo expects sales of 5.5 million in 2H of the fiscal year. This may very well be the break the company was hoping for, but we’ll see soon enough whether they can keep up the momentum.

As THQ continues to fight for survival, the company still faces very difficult decisions. This time around, it has elected to bypass the developers and instead “trim” the marketing and production teams. Sources say that 20 THQ employees were affected by this latest round of cuts.

While THQ says publically that it is necessary restructuring, employees are expected to continue to worry until at least the end of September, according to our sources. THQ has said that 10% of its workforce was redundant with the new restructuring process.

The shift is best described as a move to fund development on the key projects that the company is focused on. As part of this process we hear that some development teams at THQ could even experience some small headcount increases.

The first game (from what we are calling the new “Lean THQ”) was finally released and Darksiders II, despite the delays, scored well in reviews; but we don’t yet know how that translated into actual sales numbers yet. Our retail friends describe sales of Darksiders II as “steady,” which has to be a good sign for THQ.

It's news everyone likes to hear - price cuts, and AMD is set to slash HD 7970, HD 7950 and 7870 prices on Monday. Additionally, the company revealed that partners' interest in using HD 7970 GHz Editions for their special cards is at fault for the delay.

HD 7970 will be down $479 to $429 while HD 7950 cards will go for $349 instead of the earlier $399. HD 7870 will sell for $299 instead of $349, so it's a nice $50 cut for all these cards.

Apparently, XFX and Sapphire are expected to launch their iterations of the HD 7970 GHz Edition next week. The 7970 GHz Edition is expected to ship at 1GHz for the GPU and 6GHz for the memory, which is 75MHz and 500MHz higher, respectively, than on the HD 7970. The card comes with AMD's PowerTune that boost the card to 1050MHz.

The GHz Edition's performance is expected to bring about 10 percent overall advantage over the original HD 7970. The card's consumption isn't expected to be significantly higher, apparently due to the 28nm process improvements in TSMC, but it will be higher.

ArenaNet is dropping support for older Windows Operating Systems for Guild War users. The company has announced that after June 14th if you have not upgraded your Windows OS to at least Windows XP, Guild Wars will no longer be playable when the latest update is released.

While the studio does not like making these types of decisions, the move is necessary to improve security and enhance account management, as well as other things. ArenaNet claims that the move will only affect about .05% of the total player base, which actually is pretty surprising considering that Microsoft has not been supporting these Operating Systems for some time; and the majority of users have moved on to at least Windows XP by now.

ArenaNet has no plans to shut down GuildWars, despite the fact that a new version is in development. The company says as long as it has an active player base they will not be shutting it down. In fact, the developer believes that you could see a lot of players having an account and playing both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet still has no official release date for Guild Wars 2 yet, but sources tell us that things are moving in the right direction, and there could be an announcement soon, but we don’t have a clue yet on how soon that is.

Microsoft unveiled a $50 Samsung Focus Flash as part of a publicity event in New York City which part of a campaign to cut the price of smartphones.

Google Droid models have available since spring for $79 and even Apple has had to drop the price of its contract phones to compete. Greg Sullivan, senior mobile communications manager at Microsoft said that 70 per cent of US had not got a smartphone but over the next few years, hundreds of millions of new smartphone users will come on board, especially if the price is right.

Researcher IDC says the global smartphone market will rise 49.2 per cent this year, with more than 450 million units shipped, compared with 303.4 million in 2010. Microsoft currently holds about 2 per cent of the global smartphone market and less than 6 per cent of the U.S. market.

Now it is pushing its new line of Mango OS handsets and pushing the likes of the $50 Samsung Flash Focus. The phone incorporates a cutting-edge touch system for calls, texting and social networking. And it can also directly access Xbox Live and work with Microsoft Office documents.

Jobs' Mob has slashed its orders to vendors in the supply chain for its iPad by 25 per cent.

According to JPMorgan Chase it is the first such cut that analysts at JPMorgan’s electronic manufacturing services team in Hong Kong said they have ever seen. For Hon Hai, the cut could mean a drop to 13 million units in the fourth quarter from 17 million units in the third quarter, JPMorgan analysts wrote.

Bad news for the suppliers, but why is Apple making the cut? It is possible that the world is starting to wake up to the fact that a keyboardless netbook is as useful as a chocolate teapot and when the economy is suffering, the last thing punters want is a glorified dinner tray.

JP Morgan thinks that the cut could reflect both weakening demand in Europe due to economic conditions there as well as a strategy by Apple, the world’s biggest company by market value, to operate with reduced inventory. Wanli Wang, a Taipei-based industry analyst at RBS Asia told Bloomberg that Apple was as last having to suffer from the same reality that other tech companies had to deal with.

If you wonder why there has been a lack of brilliant ideas coming out of Britain lately it might be because the nation's businesses are cutting back on research.

A third of British companies spend nothing on searching for new ideas, services and products according to a new survey conducted by IT consultancy Portal. The survey of 500 companies up and down the country found that only a fifth of companies spend more than five per cent of their revenues on research and development (R&D), despite the fact that nearly 52 percent recognise that innovation is critical.

In a whitepaper entitled “Innovation: the first casualty of a downturn”, the companies said that the economic downturn is the main reason for failing to invest in R&D. Less than seven per cent of respondents have increased their investment since the start of the recession in 2008 while nearly 14 per cent have “cut their investment in R&D enormously.” More than 48 per cent said they would invest more if the government was able to offer tax breaks on R&D expenditure.

Lack of available funds is not the only reason for companies failing to invest sufficiently. Perceived difficulty of the process is deterring some from applying sufficient resource too.

Nvidia has decided to put a lot of pressure on Radeon 5000 series. If all goes well in a few months ATI will launch its Radeon 6000 series, and today, in late August, Nvidia decided to drop the price of Geforce GTX 470.

Geforce GTX 470 was doomed ever since Nvidia launched GTX 460 based on a new GF104 chip as the price performance ratio was great. If we go further back, GTX 470 was never a hot seller as the ones who have waited for Fermi always wanted the more expensive and yet faster GTX 480 and GTX 470 was always a second choice card. Today GTX 470 based on old and quite hot GF100 sells for just under €250 for Asus card, while most of these cards still sell for €275. The timing is great as now is the peak of back-to-school shopping spree.

This looks like a new birth for GTX 470 as this 607/ 838MHz clocked card matches the price of Radeon HD 5850 and performance wise it comes close to Radeon HD 5870. If you care about TDP, then Radeon HD 5000 series is still a better choice, but if you want the performance better than 5850 at the same price, this is the card to consider.

ATI still hasn't dropped its price as Radeon HD 5850 sells for some €240 - €250 while Radeon HD 5870 sells for at least €337 and more.